They found the dejected palace of the sisters' haughty pride
standing defenceless, at their mercy, and they were amazed by
themselves, by their hatred of the place, a hatred which oozed out
of sixty-five-year-old, forgotten wells; they ripped the house to
pieces as they hunted for the old women. They were like locusts.
They dragged the ancient tapestries off the walls and the fabric
turned to dust in their hands, they forced open money-boxes
which were full of discontinued notes and coins, they flung open
doors which cracked and fell off their hinges, they turned beds
upside-down and ransacked the contents of silver canteens, they
Judgment Day ? 303
tore baths from their moorings for the sake of their gilded feet and
pulled out the stuffing from the sofas in search of hidden treasure,
they threw the useless old swing-seat out of the nearest window.
It was as if a spell had been broken, as if an old and infuriating
conjuring trick had finally been explained. Afterwards, they
would look at each other with a disbelief in their eyes that was
half proud and half ashamed and ask, did we really do that? But we
are ordinary people . . .
It grew dark. They did not find the sisters.
They found the bodies in the dumb-waiter, but the Shakil sis-
ters had vanished, and nobody would ever see them again, not in
'Nishapur' nor anywhere on earth. They had deserted their home
but they kept their vows of retreat, crumbling, perhaps, into
powder under the rays of the sun, or growing wings and flying off
into the Impossible Mountains in the west. Women as formidable
as the three sisters Shakil never do less than they intend.
Night. In a room near the top of the house they found an old
man frowning in a four-poster bed with wooden snakes winding
around the columns. The noise had woken him up; he was sitting
bolt upright and muttering, 'So, I'm still alive.' He was grey all
over, ashen from head to foot, and so eaten up by sickness that it
was impossible to say who he was; and because he had the air of a
spirit who had returned from the dead they backed away from
him. 'I'm hungry,' he said, looking surprised, and then peered at
the cheap electric torches and smouldering firebrands of the
invaders and demanded to know what they were doing in his
quarters; whereupon they turned and fled, shouting to the police
officers that someone was up there, maybe alive, maybe dead, but
at any rate someone in that house of death, sitting up in bed and
acting smart. The police officers were on their way up when they
heard a sort of panic starting in the street outside, and they ran off
to investigate, blowing their whistles, leaving the old man to get
up and put on the grey silk dressing-gown which his mothers had
left neatly folded at the foot of his bed, and to take a long drink
from the jug of fresh lime-juice which had been there just long
Shame ? 304
enough for the ice-cubes to melt. Then he, too, heard the
screams.
They were strange screams. He heard them rise to their peaks and
then die with uncanny abruptness, and then he knew what was
coming into the house, something that could freeze a shriek in the
middle, something that petrified. Something that would not, this
time, be sated before it reached him, or cheated, or escaped from;
that had entered the night-streets of the city and would not be
denied. Something coming up the stairs: he heard it roar.
He stood beside the bed and waited for her like a bridegroom
on his wedding night, as she climbed towards him, roaring,
like a fire driven by the wind. The door blew open. And he
in the darkness, erect, watching the approaching glow, and then
she was there, on all fours, naked, coated in mud and blood and
shit, with twigs sticking to her back and beetles in her hair. She
saw him and shuddered; then she rose up on her hind legs with
her forepaws outstretched and he had just enough time to
say, 'Well, wife, so here you are at last,' before her eyes forced
him to look.
He struggled against their hypnotic power, their gravitational
pull, but it was no use, his eyes lifted, until he was staring into the
fiery yellow heart of her, and saw there, just for an instant, some
flickering, some dimming of the flame in doubt, as though she had
entertained for that tiny fragment of time the wild fantasy that she
was indeed a bride entering the chamber of her beloved; but the
furnace burned the doubts away, and as he stood before her,
unable to move, her hands, his wife's hands, reached out to him
and closed.
His body was falling away from her, a headless drunk, and after
that the Beast faded in her once again, she stood there blinking
stupidly, unsteady on her feet, as if she didn't know that all the
stories had to end together, that the fire was just gathering its
strength, that on the day of reckoning the judges are not exempt
from judgment, and that the power of the Beast of shame cannot
Judgment Day ? 305
be held for long within any one frame of flesh and blood, because
it grows, it feeds and swells, until the vessel bursts.
And then the explosion comes, a shock-wave that demolishes the
house, and after it the fireball of her burning, rolling outwards to
the horizon like the sea, and last of all the cloud, which rises and
spreads and hangs over the nothingness of the scene, until I can no
longer see what is no longer there; the silent cloud, in the shape of
a giant, grey and headless man, a figure of dreams, a phantom with
one arm lifted in a gesture of farewell.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book was written with the financial assistance of the Arts
Council of Great Britain. It also owes a good deal to the entirely
non-financial assistance of many others, my gratitude to whom
will perhaps best be expressed by leaving them unnamed.
The unattributed quotation on page 126 has been taken from
The Life Science by P.B. and J.S. Medawar (Wildwood House,
1977). The italicized line on page 181 is from Saul Bellow's The
Adventures ofAugie March (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1954). I have
also quoted from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan
Kundera, translated by Michael Henry Heim (Faber and Faber,
1982); from the Muirs' translation of The Trial by Franz Kafka
(Victor Gollancz, 1935); from The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli,
in the.translation by Luigi Ricci, edited by E.R.P. Vincent, for
World's Classics, Oxford University Press (1935); from NJ.
Dawood's translation of The Koran (Penguin Classics, 1956);
and from the plays The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman, translated by
P. Tegel (Pluto Press, 1979), and Danton's Death by Georg
Biichner, in the version by Howard Brenton from a translation by
Jane Fry (Methuen, 1982). My thanks to all concerned; and to the
many journalists and writers, both Western and Eastern, to whom
I am indebted.
My gratitude, too, to Walter, for letting go; and finally, and as
always, to Clarissa, for everything.
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